Tag: Old Age

Aging Deliberately

I have always been challenged by Thoreau’s ambition to live life intentionally, with purpose and awareness: “I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” To live life deliberately. It seems like such an obvious and worthwhile goal.

I first read Walden in college. By then, it was too late to live my childhood deliberately – and is that even possible? For most of us, choices as to how we lived were severely limited until we were emancipated from our families. Our diets, our activities, our free time were all greatly prescribed. And the nuclear family meant that we often were not even aware that other choices existed. Do you remember how shocked you were when you ate a meal or spent the night at a friend’s house and realized that people did things differently? At six years old, I visited a house where the children were allowed to operate the television by themselves! Who knew?

During adolescence and young adulthood, hormones and the drive for emancipation drove me, drove most of us. And then, quickly enough, I was driven by my career and children. And too busy to think about much else. How else does one get through those years but by ploughing ahead with blinders on? When I visit my children now and watch them cope with young children and jobs and all the juggling of such a life, I still couldn’t tell you how it’s done – except that, under the circumstances, one has to suspend doubt that one can do it.

It wasn’t until I was in my fifties that I really had time to pause and think about the shape of my life. There wasn’t much that I could do about the past (except make sure I was telling myself a truthful story – but more on that another time), but the future stood out as a time of … my own. Soon I would not have to work anymore, would not have to live in a given place or a prescribed way, would not have direct responsibility for anyone except my partner and myself. But didn’t Janice Joplin warn us: “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose”? Freedom itself can lead to futility, despair.

Jeannette Winterson says that the “question, ‘How shall I live?’ is fierce.” It is perhaps the only question. For so much of our lives things seem out of our control, and in our latter years we are, of course, subject to the decay and disease of our bodies. And yet. Surely facing deterioration and death is among the things we can do deliberately, unless we are robbed of this ability by dementia (which is just one of the things that is heartbreaking about that condition).

Here is Montaigne in his essay “Experience”:

We are great fools. “He has passed his life in idleness,” say we: “I have done nothing today.” What? Have you not lived? That is not only the fundamental, but the most illustrious, of your occupations. “Had I been put to the management of great affairs, I should have made it seen what I could do.” “Have you known how to meditate and manage your life? You have performed the greatest work of all.” … Have you known how to regulate your conduct, you have done a great deal more than he who has composed books. Have you known how to take repose, you have done more than he who has taken empires and cities.

So as we retire, we might ask ourselves Montaigne’s implied question, “Have you known how to take repose?” and realize its importance. In his repose, Montaigne looked inward and wrote his essays.

Of course, not all courses are open to us. How we (or the vagaries of life) have prepared our bodies and minds for this last part of life is consequential. Lord Bolingbroke who was forced into retirement in 1735 at age 57, wrote a treatise on study and retirement.  He reminds us such study “would have been agreeable and easy if he had accustomed himself to it early, will be unpleasant and impracticable late: such men lose their intellectual powers for want of exerting them, and, having trifled away youth, are reduced to the necessity of trifling away age. It fares with the mind just as it does with the body.” Cicero expresses similar concerns about dayspring mishandled in his essay on old age. But within the limits of our bodies and minds and preparation, choices still must be made. Old age is different from youth; to ignore the opportunities and challenges it presents will lead us to senescence mishandled.

Carl Jung always insisted that the stages of life had different purposes. “We cannot live in the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.” You can read Jung’s “Stages of Life” for his advice on how to spend your old age, but, hey, we’ve lived a long time. Maybe we can figure it out for ourselves. And then do it. Deliberately.

This week’s story, “Essentials,” is not about old age, but it is about the challenge we face at every stage of life – how to make life meaningful. How to live – within the parameters with which we are faced – with intensity and deliberation and good intent.

Geriatric Homesteading

In its original sense (at least in the US), homesteading referred to staking out a piece of land to work and live on and therefore, after a period of time, take title. In more recent years, we’ve had urban homesteading, where vacant properties are allotted provided the residents inhabit and improve them. The emphasis is on continual residence creating a right of ownership. As I started thinking about elderly people I know, I thought we might be seeing a different kind of homesteading. And I’m not sure whether it was a good or bad thing.

Consider the case of a woman who is in her mid-eighties and lives alone in her house. She has had major and minor accidents, been in and out of hospitals and rehab facilities, but hangs onto her house for dear life. The house was not necessarily designed for the elderly; it is on one floor but the driveway is steep (the cause of one major accident) and the house is not handicapped accessible in all ways. It is also a long distance from the people who most want to support my friend – her children, who travel and take time away from home and work to help out. Right now, my friend has gone home with her daughter for a while after some surgery which she was recovering from slowly. But she’ll be back. My friend is clinging to the house with all she has. What does it represent?

Independence, I suppose. Although the fact that it is in a suburb and requires a car (and that’s another subject) for any kind of shopping, meaning that my friend (who still owns a car, but often cannot drive because of temporary disability) requires assistance. She is lucky; people are willing to help. Her children make great sacrifices to come back and forth, but they too seem willing. This has gone on for about three years now. Why is my friend hanging onto her house with such tenacity?

Perhaps because the alternatives are not attractive: elderly housing, assisted living, nursing homes? They have the aura of the funeral parlor about them. They are not “home.” What is home? Frost said it was the “place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” And if it’s your own home you, of course, have control. Loss of control is one of our greatest fears.

We have mythologized the value of home ownership in this country; John Greenleaf Whittier wrote that:

Your homestead’s title gives you all
That idle wealth can buy.

Your home gives you privacy. Sovereignty. But there is no one there in the middle of the night to help the sovereign, and it often takes a consortium of people to keep elderly people in their homes. These are stubborn homesteaders, holding out against the advice of friends, appeals by realtors, and the pleading of over-burdened children.

I don’t have an answer. I have seen enough elderly housing and assisted living centers to understand why they are avoided. One thinks fondly of European granny cottages in a child’s backyard, but this is often neither legal nor practical. I do not have a solution – but we should have one. When the boomers started to reproduce in large numbers, we created suburbs. Now that these boomers are reaching senescence, we need to invent something else. Something as appealing as suburbia was in the 1950’s. Something that works.

Houses are powerful symbols. For Jung, the house (in dreams) represented the personality with its many rooms, its order and disorder. But the house is also representative of the body; “Ain’t goin’ to need this house no longer” says the old Gospel song. In the Bible, we are told that God has many mansions for the blessed, and one of the oldest mnemonic devices was making our mind into a house or palace and storing needed information in the many rooms where it can be retrieved – Napoleon used this method and so did Sherlock Holmes. For many, our original homes take on an Edenic quality – my mother in her dementia and confusion longs for her childhood home.

Often, I think of my friend alone in her house and wonder what will happen if she wakes up disoriented in the night. Or if she trips over her little dog (pets being another reason the elderly cling to home). I think of her children – although I am old, I have a mother and mother-in-law still living. I know about the care of elderly relatives far away. And I think of the people without homes. Street people, refugees, prisoners. There should be a better solution to this, but it is part of the “blight that man was born for” which all of us and Hopkins “mourn for.” But, still, we could do better.

Meanwhile, there are thousands of old folks squatting in their deteriorating homes and becoming increasingly defensive toward anyone who tries to move them. I think again of Frost and his description of a very elderly farmer, alone in his drafty house on a frigid winter’s night, nodding by the fire:

One aged man—one man—can’t fill a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
It’s thus he does it of a winter night.

It’s “thus” that they do it, and it’s both heroic and sad. But it’s preferable – to them, if not to the rest of us.

The story this week, “Option to Buy,” is about the potent symbol of houses – and maybe a little about the difference between a house and a home.

Failing Bodies and the Failing Planet

First of all, you must read The Overstory by Richard Powers. It is a powerful novel –a story in the best and oldest sense of the word – about trees, nature, and the place of humanity in the cosmos. And it’s about psychology – how much we are affected by our peers, our culture, how hard it is to step aside, how dangerous it can be to think outside our conditioning, but also how necessary. The mood of the book is at once lyrical and dire. Humankind does not appreciate the intricacy and power of nature and seems not to want to learn.

As elders, we will be especially moved by this book and its characters, many of whom we follow into old age. We will want to warn the next generation. But how are the old (myself, the author, all of us) to tell the young and the disenfranchised that they cannot have what we had – new cars, wooden houses, air conditioning in home and vehicle, all of it?  And we had it without guilt. We had the advantage of not giving any thought to clearing a lot, building a house, driving a big car just for the fun of it, having as many children as we could afford to support – and never considering what the earth could support.

We know better now. In part, we learned from our own bodies. We are paying for our early smoking, drinking, drugs. We take statins, use inhalers, go to physical therapy. Athletes are getting joints replaced and hoping they did not land on their heads too many times. Surgeons replace arteries clogged with the fat we ingested thoughtlessly. Dayspring mishandled. And as we retire, we have time to look around at our devastated planet – a devastation that we funded with our new houses and cars and expectations that progress meant we could have more and more. Our bodies and minds know that perpetual progress is a myth. We know this as we nurse our knees and grope for that name we can’t remember. We know this by going back to the neighborhood where we grew up and looking for the woods we played in. The planet too has paid for our mistakes: global warming, plastic continents floating on the ocean, butterflies that never return.

In the middle ages there was the idea that the human body was a microcosm of the universal macrocosm – and each individual grew old in this post-lapsarian world just as the world also grew older, decayed from its Edenic beginnings. But the Enlightenment assured us the world was progressing, not regressing. In the seventeenth century, George Hakewill made an early appeal for the idea that life on earth, that earth, was improving, progressing – and yet even he realized what this meant for the idea of microcosm/macrocosm: “And though whiles I have laboured to free the world from old age, I feele it creeping upon my selfe.”

But the truth is, whether or not humans are accurate microcosms of creation, we are most definitely part of the macrocosm and most definitely not in charge – as much as it might temporarily seem so. In trying to overcome and overwhelm the natural world, we have forgotten we are only part of that world. Irretrievably imbedded in the macrocosm. It is true of a tree; it is true of homo sapiens.

One of my favorite characters in The Overstory is the (fictional) scientist Patricia Westerford – at one point she says: “Trees stand at the heart of ecology. And they must come to stand at the heart of human politics. Tagore said, Trees are the earth’s endless efforts to speak to the listening heaven. But people – oh, my word – people! People could be the heaven the Earth is trying to speak to.”

This novel is full of stories and statistics that will frighten you. They should frighten you. But it is also full of the glory of creation. There is a theory (from Carl Sagan among others) that if humanity was evolved by creation for a purpose, we are perhaps an effort by the cosmos to become aware of itself. Through us. Perhaps our task is not to overcome, but to appreciate. Old people should be good at this. We are also, perhaps (because elders have often stepped out of economic and romantic competition), capable of what one of the characters in Powers’ book calls unbinding. His question is this: Can people come to independent moral decisions that run counter to their tribe’s beliefs? Unbinding. Seeing things outside of cultural norms.

We have lived long enough to know the costs to the world we live in for the lives we have led. To recognize the difference between cost and value. Look around you. Unbind. And read the book. Richard Powers says it far better than I can.

And for more on trees, look at my “Fable About a Soccer Mom.”

 

 

The Mirror of Age

There is a footnote in Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” which all of us can identify with:

I was sitting alone in my wagon-lit compartment when a more than usually violent jerk of the train swung back the door of the adjoining washing-cabinet, and an elderly gentleman in a dressing-gown and a traveling cap came in. I assumed that he had been about to leave the washing-cabinet which divides the two compartments, and had taken the wrong direction and come into my compartment by mistake. Jumping up with the intention of putting him right, I at once realized to my dismay that the intruder was nothing but my own reflection in the looking-glass of the open door. I can still recollect that I thoroughly disliked his appearance.

First, we must remember that Freud has defined “uncanny” as the “mixture of the familiar and the eerie.” And, in this case, it was his own image as an “elderly gentleman” that was uncanny. And so, perhaps, it is with old age. The face is familiar but the transformation can sometimes be…eerie. I think part of it is because when we look at our own faces in the mirror or at the faces we love, we see a vision anchored to the past. It is only when we unexpectedly identify ourselves as a stranger that we can see what we really look like to others.

The old face in the mirror is a familiar motif –we see it in poetry. In both Robert Graves’ “Face in the Mirror” and Thomas Hardy’s “I Look into My Glass,” the poet contrasts the visage he sees with how he feels inside. Graves is puzzled:

I pause with razor poised, scowling derision
At the mirrored man whose beard needs my attention,
And once more ask him why
He still stands ready, with a boy’s presumption,
To court the queen in her high silk pavilion.

Hardy is more outraged as he views his “wasting skin” and wishes his heart would also waste away:

But Time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide.

For babies, the “mirror stage” starts a process of physical identity. For the aging person, the mirror may serve as an agent of disintegration rather than integration; a secure sense of the physical self developed when young – and as young – is displaced by the changing body in the mirror: “The I or ego which is developed in the mirror stage of infancy is structured precisely to resist the anxiety of bodily fragmentation. In old age, with one’s position reversed before the mirror, the ego finds it more difficult to maintain its defenses” (Woodward, Aging and Its Discontents). Fragmentation rather than integration – no wonder we are disoriented.

Still, we have wonderful self-portraits of artists like Rembrandt in their old age. A triumph of the spirit looks out of Rembrandt’s wrinkled eyes. I have lasted, Rembrandt seems to say, despite and because of this old, battered body. We know Rembrandt used a mirror for his many self-portraits. Clearly he came to terms with what he saw. Such self-examination is not easy, but I think it would be a worthwhile exercise.

The old, deaf, and presumed mad (I’m not so sure) Jonathan Swift, upon being led across a room in his dotage, caught sight of himself in a mirror and cried out “O poor old man.” And so cry we all. But, near the very end, Swift was found rocking himself and muttering “I am what I am, I am what I am.” There is a truth in the mirror. We can deny it, but it is part of who we are and it cannot be rejected anymore than can the self/soul that peers out of the reflected eyes.

Second Growth

For anyone interested in the process of aging, one could do worse than perusing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s journals. Emerson lived to be almost seventy-nine, and kept a journal between the ages of seventeen and seventy-two. Not only do we read about his transit through time, but he relates the development and aging of his friends – and Emerson’s friends were wonderful people indeed.

I have conscientiously kept a journal for the past fifteen years; in the writing, it has been therapeutic; in its existence (particularly with the aid of the word processor’s search feature), it has been an aid to memory; in its chronology, it has helped me understand my own journey through time. I wish, though, that I had such documentation of earlier crises in my life, as I rely on my memory – both historical and emotional – to try to make some sense out of things retrospectively, which I believe is part of the mission of old age. And one’s own memory can be a sly fox. Of course, there remains the problem of what to do with the written details of one’s life and thought when the end of life (or mind) comes, but for now it is a priceless resource (to me). More on this in another post (as well as hints as to how to journal consistently), but back to Emerson.

In a journal entry that Emerson made in February 1862 (he was fifty-seven), he gives us his thoughts on a second growth in old age, as well as a comment from his friend Thoreau (what wouldn’t you give to go on a long walk with those two?):

[Oliver Wendell] Holmes came out late in life with a strong sustained growth for two or three years, like the old pear trees which have done nothing for ten years, and at last begin to grow great. The Lowells come forward slowly, and Henry Thoreau remarks that men may have two growths like pear trees.

And this got me thinking about… dandelions. For one thing, it is that time of year in North Carolina. For another, dandelions have two “growths,” two “blossomings.” One day on a walk, I began wondering about dandelions (having seen a wonderful crop of them). How do they metamorphose from a yellow bloom to a white one with no “transitional” blossoms? As I got down on my haunches and investigated more closely, it seemed that the golden bloom closed up again and then reopened as the white feathery blossom – I found this diagram of the dandelion life cycle:

dandelion

 

So, the blossom is twice born – once to youth, beauty, color, and sexual purpose (attracting those bees), and the second time to lightness, airiness, ultimate dispersal, and perhaps rebirth. In-between, there is a period of rest, a closing down, a respite. It might behoove us to think of our whitening heads as such a second flowering.

For those of you interested in Emerson’s journals (which are voluminous), I recommend the abbreviated Heart of Emerson’s Journals, edited by Bliss Perry. For those of you interested in Emerson’s life, I recommend Mr. Emerson’s Wife, by my friend Amy Belding Brown.

For a story this week, you might go back to “Again and Again and Again” for a tale of Walden Pond, or you can read the prospectus for a novel (I actually did write the novel several years later), included here as “A New Fable of Old Age.” This started as a thought experiment in which the old are forced into a second growth. I apologize for my tardiness in posting this time; we have been visiting our elderly mothers. Perhaps more about that too at a later date.

 

Renoir, de Beauvoir, and the Artist of Kouroo

In 2012, there was a film made about the old age of Renoir. The film was lovely, but painful to watch, as Renoir coped with rheumatoid arthritis as he kept on painting, having to have assistants wrap his fingers around the brush to get him started. Possible for Renoir, perhaps, because he had the fame and fortune to get much support and respect, even though he was greatly debilitated. No nursing home for him. But still inspiring and lovely – pursing his project to the end.

In her La Vieillesse (interestingly, a French feminine noun meaning “old age,” but translated in the English version to The Coming of Age), de Beauvoir says that “there is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning – devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work. In spite of the moralists’ opinion to the contrary, in old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in upon ourselves.” Yes. But. She also says (and all of this is in her conclusion to the book) it is fairly inevitable that “illusions” will vanish and “one’s zeal for life pass away.” Therefore, we shouldn’t think too much but just continue in established “paths.” De Beauvoir does not think much of retirement.

De Beauvoir tells us the retired, “even if he keeps his health and clarity of mind…is nevertheless the victim of that terrible curse, boredom.” How afraid we are of being bored! What did Pascal say? “All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.” And what did Kafka say? “You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.” When on earth do we get a chance to sit alone and listen if not in old age, in retirement? Is it such a terrible curse? And what about people (like athletes) whose passions are dependent on a functioning body? My folks were devoted to tennis and desolate when they could not play.

There is more to it. De Beauvoir says that in old age we are overwhelmed by the past, as there is so much of it. She talks about the “hard apprenticeship” of childhood and the fact that “the unpleasant memories of this time that were repressed in adulthood [by ceaseless activity] revive in old age. The barriers that stood up well enough so long as the individual was active and subject to social pressure give way to the lonely idleness of old age.” Isn’t this a good thing (not the loneliness, perhaps, but the time to reflect)? Do we want to die with these barriers in place?   (This is a very good question, and my readers may have very different answers.)

This is one of those divergent problems (see Schumacher’s Guide for the Perplexed for a good definition of divergent and convergent problems) – for which there are only contingent answers. Surely we should pursue projects that engage us, challenge us. And this makes me think of Thoreau and his Artist of Kouroo. I don’t know if HDT heard this fable somewhere or made it up, but in Walden, he gives us an artist “who was disposed to strive after perfection. One day it came into his mind to make a staff. Having considered that in an imperfect work time is an ingredient, but into a perfect work time does not enter, he said to himself, It shall be perfect in all respects, though I should do nothing else in my life.” The artist works and works, through endless eons of time, until he had a pure and faultless creation and “he saw by the heap of shavings still fresh at his feet, that, for him and his work, the former lapse of time had been an illusion.” In true creative engagement, time falls away. “His singleness of purpose and resolution, and his elevated piety, endowed him, without his knowledge, with perennial youth.” Perennial youth. But, when one puts the brush or the pen or the carving knife down, doesn’t one still have to deal with the aging body? May we always have projects ahead of us, but may we also be prepared to just sit – when we want to and when we have no choice.

This week’s story (“Every Winged Bird According to Its Kind”) is a part of my Metamorphoses series and concerns an old woman who has found a modest project, an object of engagement, in her old age.

 

Smile for Spinoza

When  thirty-two year old Jonathan Swift wrote the resolutions after which this blog is entitled (“When I Come to be Old”), he included the determination “not to be peevish or morose, or suspicious” on his list. At the end of his list he confessed he feared that, although he set up rules for his senescence, he “would observe none.” And so it was. Jonathan Swift was not a happy old man.

I got to thinking about positivity and cheerfulness as I read the cover article on this week’s NY Times Book Review, entitled “Put on a Happy Face,” which reviewed books that took an optimistic view of the world (a difficult task in present times, but apparently not impossible). In particular, it made me muse about the value of cheerfulness in old age, and it reminded me of something Spinoza said.

Spinoza led a hard life; he grew up Portuguese Jewish community in Holland, but was ex-communicated by his own people for his philosophical work. In his Ethics (1677), he strives to outline a rational basis for life, in the course of which he demonstrates the value of …cheerfulness. “Cheerfulness cannot be excessive, but is always good; melancholy, on the other hand, is always evil.” This makes sense to me. In the previous section, Spinoza had elaborated on how he came to his conclusion: “Joy is an affect [emotion] by which the body’s power of acting is increased or aided. Sadness, of the other hand, is an affect by which the body’s power of acting is diminished or restrained.” In other words, it makes sense to be happy, cheerful, positive. Cheerful people have more energy, more “power.” Sadness weighs us down, “restrains” us.

I remember an older man I worked with who was somewhat inept and clumsy, and not too awfully bright. But he was a ray of sunshine each and every day. Everything was going to be terrific, he thought you looked great today, and wasn’t it a beautiful day? Jim’s concrete contributions to the team were minimal, but no one ever suggested getting rid of him. His emotional support was priceless. The tag I use on my e-mail is from Thoreau and sometimes reminds me of Jim: “To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”

Old people do not have a reputation for being particularly cheerful. Old men are often characterized as grumpy and old women as crabby – not universally or accurately labeled, yet the stereotype is there. A question worth exploring might be: How does one maintain an attitude of optimism and cheerfulness as one ages, when (perhaps) the joints hurt, the teeth ache, the mirror mocks, and the pension is not keeping up with inflation?   I don’t think it can be done if we are fighting what is happening to us; warriors are not cheerful. But (perhaps) if we can accept the ride down, we might consider some words of Rilke:

And we, who always think
of happiness as rising feel the emotion
that almost overwhelms us
whenever a happy thing falls..

There can be, I think, happiness in the fall if one does not insist that one is not going to fall (while all the time headed down the rabbit hole).

Spinoza infers cheerfulness is its own reward. It increases “the power of acting.” And the people around us like it. But it is not always easy. “Smile though your heart is aching” advises the words of the song by that sad little tramp, Charlie Chaplin. Cheerfulness can’t just be a façade, nor can it be a blind optimism. You need to believe that there is some happiness in the fall, and you have to believe in the efficacy of a smile. And if your smile is not initially wholly sincere, an habitual cheerfulness might actually lead to a happier life. And that would certainly be something to smile about.

None of this is meant to minimize the effect of clinical depression or deep and justified sadness. But our attitude toward life is worth examining once in a while. This week’s story (“Snickerdoodles”) is about an older person who sees a vision of a more positive life (with Chaucer’s help) in the midst of change and loss. Her revelation comes while baking cookies; we will have to find our own catalyst.

The Sacred Book

Books are wonderful. I learned at a very young age that there is nothing better than a good book.   Books were the things, besides the body, that seemed to transcend every transition in life. I married, had children changed husbands, launched kids, moved houses – but there were always the books. A mystified coworker (who could not believe I spent precious vacation time going somewhere to talk about books) once gave me a sweatshirt that said: “So many books, so little time.” Yes, indeed.

I thought you could learn anything from a book. My father may have been the culprit on this. He built his first house  out of a book entitled Your Dream Home: How to Build it for Less than $3,500 – very popular with GI’s who came home after World War II. My father read the book and he built a house. He had some help and the house had its problems, but the book told him what he needed to know, and – more than that – it convinced him it was possible. In later years, he used books to teach himself to sail, play chess, and to build a fireplace with rocks that he picked up on the beach. I have a clear memory of all of us standing around the massive hearth, where misshapen rocks were held together with a little more concrete than you might see in more professional masonry, and holding our breaths as we waited to see whether it would draw smoke. And it did. Again, not perfectly, but well enough for the man who was so proud of it. You could learn anything out of books.

Over the years I used books for a variety of reasons. I wore out my Dr. Spock while raising children and I am on my second red Betty Crocker cookbook.  I learned to knit and crochet with books; I taught myself enough French to pass the second-language translation test for a graduate degree I used books to plan trips, bake bread, grow roses, sew curtains, buy cars, set up a retirement account, research almost anything I was interested in.

Of course, the obvious extrapolation from all of this textual success was that the same vehicles that taught me information and crafts, that delivered me safely where I wanted to go and told me if my child had the chicken pox, could also teach me how to live a happy, peaceful life, could free me from irrational fears (hypochondria, catastrophic thinking) and rational fears (death and global warming), could help me adjust to old age. So, I read great books, self-help books, spiritual memoirs, important works in psychology and philosophy and popular works of psychobabble. I ran through subjects and authors. Still I could not read myself into faith or peace or self-acceptance. But I kept trying. If the original story were true, it was just a matter of reading the right book, wasn’t it? And I had always thought there could not be enough books, but perhaps we should remember what the Preacher says (in Ecclesiastes, one of my favorite books of the Bible): “And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.”

So my faith in books had some holes in it. It is clear, while I have learned much on a “technical” level, there is something that books have not been able to give me. I have wandered and thirsted through Borges’ labyrinthine libraries and gathered all of the likely candidates. And still there were no answers to many important questions. (See this week’s story, “By the Book,” for a tale of bibliomancy, the belief that books can indeed answer specific questions.)

I ran across this passage from the ever-pessimistic Schopenhauer not long ago (and it is worth thinking about pessimistic vs. optimistic attitudes toward life and where they land us, but that is for another time):

…much reading robs the mind of all elasticity; it is like keeping a spring under a continuous weight. If a man does not want to think, the safest plan is to take up a book directly he has a spare moment.

This practice accounts for the fact that learning makes most men more stupid and foolish than they are by nature, and prevents their writings from being a success; they remain, as Pope has said. “Forever reading, never to be read.”

“The safest plan is the pick up a book….” Books are no different from other experiences in many ways, but perhaps inferior in being at second hand. And if – like other experiences – we do not take time to process our reading, make it part of us, love, criticize, accept or reject what we read, books are, at last, simply amusements and diversions.   I will always love books, but I no longer believe they will save me. And I particularly cannot believe that the next one will be the jackpot – because there will always be a next one (ask the Preacher).

So, here might be the new story. There is a time in life to lean back and try to bring the reading and experience into synch – to enter into a Lady Slane (All Passion Spent) period of reflection. This may be one of the things old age is for. A moratorium on input and time for processing. I have not read every good book, but perhaps I have realized that I will never get to the end of good books. And if I keep trying to get to the end of them, I might never get to the bottom of them.

Shrove Tuesday

Tuesday (February 13) is Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday – called “fat” because it was the last day Christians could eat up all the rich stores in their pantries before Lent, which started the next day. It is also called Shrove Tuesday, because the faithful were encouraged to think about their sins in advance of the penitential Ash Wednesday. Shrove is a form of the verb shrive, meaning: “present oneself to a priest for confession, penance, and absolution.” Perhaps, in some traditions, that literally meant going to the confessional in preparation for participating in the Ash Wednesday service. In any case, one was to be cleansed from one’s sins either by acting them out and eating them up (Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday) or by getting them absolved through repentance and confession (Shrove Tuesday) – or perhaps by doing both (acting out and then getting forgiven).

In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, the first Monday of Lent is Clean Monday, when both the soul and the household are thoroughly cleaned. Perhaps this is related in some way to the practice of spring cleaning. In any case, the idea is to sweep the decks and enter Lent with a clean conscience and a clean house.

Because it is related to Easter, Shrove Tuesday is a “moveable feast,” dependent on the celestial lunar calendar rather than what is called the “civil” calendar – but which is really the Gregorian calendar (named after a the pope who instituted it, so it is not entirely civil!). Hemingway used the term for the title of his Paris sketches: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast.”  As we age, we might think about what were the moveable feasts in our lives – memories which can enrich us. Of course, there are also memories that bring regret. For those, perhaps we need the cleansing of Shrove Tuesday or Clean Monday.

In earlier times, old age was seen as a time for repentance and making one’s soul right. Widows and widowers often joined convents and monasteries. In the Prologue to The Rule of St. Benedict (c. 530), aspirants to the monastic life are cautioned that “our life span has been lengthened by way of a truce, that we may amend our misdeeds.” The Buddhists have a tradition of older people “going forth” into a form of psychological homelessness in preparation for their death. It was a time for renunciation and, perhaps, mental reconciliation.

In our culture, renunciation in old age often takes the form of downsizing. Clearing house is, perhaps, a form of shriving. Tag sales are held, children are encouraged to take Grandma’s china, thrift shops receive our donations by the bagful. The accumulation of a lifetime is evaluated and distributed. And such adjustments also require psychological recalibrations, cleansing of false ideas about who we are, where we’ve been, where we’re going.

As we enter Lent, it might be well to think the need for cleanliness of all types. The story I have posted today (“Shrove Tuesday”) takes place in a laundromat, a “Temple of Clean,” where old meet young, and everyone is “shriven of their sweat and dirt and filth until the next week. It is where our transgressions are rinsed away, spun into filaments, and tumbled out into the upper air.”

A Diminished Thing?

At the end of Frost’s poem, the oven bird asks the question: “What to make of a diminished thing?” The query follows the comparison of dusty late summer to the moist blossoms of spring. As a late autumn bird myself, I ask: Is old age a “diminished thing”? And, if it is, what do we “make of” it?

There are many metaphors for the trajectory of life: paths, ladders, steps, bridges. In his Convivio, Dante pictures the course of life as a parabola. We go up and we come down. The “high point” of the parabola is around age thirty-five, a date Dante comes to based on Christ’s death in this thirty-fourth year. “It was not fitting that his divinity should be present in something that was in decline.” What, exactly, is “in decline” in the latter part of life? What is “diminishing”? I can give you a long list: teeth, endurance, bone density, strength – and you may add your own infirmities. But, is there something waxing that compensates for that which is waning?

A vigorous old age should be celebrated and enjoyed (may you be so fortunate!). But, however expanded the life span, there will come a time when vigor will diminish, and we must have a story with which to comprehend this change in terms other than those of utter failure. Byron’s “So We’ll Go No More a Roving” and Burns’ “John Anderson, My Jo” both look back at younger days, but seem to be reconciled to the facts of age. But, in addition to being reconciled, might we not use the more contemplative opportunities of age to actively integrate all we have learned about life, all we have experienced?

David Galenson’s book on age and art, Old Masters and Young Geniuses, divides artists into two groups: conceptual geniuses who do innovative work early, and experimentalists, whose best work is the product of the slow accretion of learning, experience, and reflection – all of which occur in the later years. My favorite novel of old age, Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent, presents a woman intent on spending her old age in contemplation, life’s “last, supreme luxury.” There are compensations in age, but we cannot define them by the values of our culture and our own younger days – or we may be fighting a losing battle. “You are only as old as you feel” becomes an exhortation to feel younger, not to experience old age. And the loss of that experience would be diminishment indeed.

And it might be that acceptance is necessary for true appreciation of what age has to offer. Beethoven – one of those masters whose late work is his best – entitled the final movement of his Opus 135, “The Difficult Decision.” The ending of this string quartet is thought to be one of the last pieces of music Beethoven ever wrote. Over the notes he wrote the question, “Must it be?” He then responds to himself as the movement lightens and quickens: “It must be.” The music resolves itself; Beethoven himself seems to find resolve. There may be some energy in fighting the inevitable, but it is a fight we are destined to lose. And perhaps that energy could be put to better use.

The Buddha recommended that people ponder five reflections every day – on the nature and fragility of the body, on the body’s unavoidable aging and decay, on mortality, on the inevitability of separation from all we hold dear, and on karma – the fact that our happiness depends on our actions. While it all sounds harsh, the Buddha assures us that our equanimity depends on acceptance of the truth.

I have posted two stories (“The Birthday Paradox” and “A Perfect Ending”) about the diminishments and magnifications of age. As I have said, aging is one of the divergent problems of life. Aging has no formulaic solution, but this does not mean that attention should not be paid.